It’s hard to believe only a week ago we were still in winter’s frozen thrall, praying not to fall. That”s when I heard the rumor: a shipment of salt had finally arrived at Walgreens! I called to be sure it was true, and to check the weight, under ten pounds, light enough to carry home. “Great! I’ll be right over!”

I first stopped at Pick ‘N Save, bought a load of groceries for my backpack, then walked to Walgreens and found the salt. Except it wasn’t salt. It was another one of those chemical concoctions that have to be kept out of reach of children. I didn’t want it for clearing off my roof! So that’s what people use on their walks, I thought, and the salespeople don’t seem to notice it’s not even salt.

I continued on to Sendiks, and they actually had salt, real salt, rock salt, no warnings about kids, in 25-pound bags. Hmmm, and I already had ten pounds of groceries on my back. Now or never, I told myself. If I wait, it may be gone. Well, 25 plus 10 equals 35, and I lift 40 pounds on the shoulder press. But my back’s supported on the machines, so I’m not carrying the weights, and certainly not schlepping them for more than a half mile. I bought the bag anyway and started out. Dead weight, this is dead weight, when will I learn my limits? I plunked the dead weight onto the first bus stop bench I came to, no bus home from here. Finally I picked the salt sack up and placed it belly high, as if I were pregnant. Didn’t help. I kept an eye out for friends in cars, seriously considered stopping at someone’s house, as I navigated the icy walks.

I didn’t have to carry it to term! About two-thirds of the way home, Thalia was pulling into her driveway. “Hi, would you mind giving my bag of salt a ride to my house?” I asked. “Sure I’ll do it,” she replied, “Would you like to come with it?”

Okay, I won’t do that again. I’ll take a stroller out of the garage next time I need salt.


 

You click the wrong spot, and you never know where you’ll end up. I did that the other day, and since that wrong spot was in Eudora, my Email application, I ended up with a garbled in-box. Over 500 messages had been waiting for me to deal with them, and now they’ll never be dealt with. Rather than try to sort out the messed messages, which I already knew was impossible (previous experience, believe it or not), or search for missing information that now was dislocated, I trashed everything in my in-box.

It’s over 3 ½ years since the last time I did this. Here’s a poem I wrote then:
CLEAN-UP OF TIME POLLUTION
I lost everything in my in-box
Messages I intended to answer
Articles I hadn't read
Yet
Political actions, invitations,
Birth of Jeremiah congratulations,
So why aren't I up-
Set?
656 messages waiting for action from me.
Now there are none.
Suddenly I'm free.

Did I learn anything from that first mistake? Yes. Let go! It was time for those messages to say goodbye.
Have I learned anything from the second mistake? Yes. But I don’t yet know what it is.
 

Shorewood is one big construction project, gas pipe replacement, Oakland Avenue replacement, perhaps even replacement of the ugly planters. WE Energies has been digging all summer, then the dirt left on sidewalks turns to mud when it rains. Our friend Paul, who has had a hip replacement and then a replacement of the replacement, almost had a third replacement when he slipped and fell, thanks to the muddy walks. And I've had some close calls.

For me, there’s also flower replacement. I called WE Energies about 7 or 8 times to make sure that they would not ruin what flowers I’d managed to save from bindweed and that they would not put a single grass seed nor any chemical fertilizers on our parkway. They were great about the first request, even painted a note about the flowers on the pavement, and were careful not to dig till I had moved all the plants. But not too long after they’d put in fresh topsoil, they covered every empty spot with grass seed, not just the topsoil, but along the edges where I had mulched to kill all plants and between the flowers. Though I’ve mentioned it to them a few times, it’s still there. In fact the grass has already begun to grow. After all my years of pulling weeds and grass, WE Energies has given me a fresh crop. The upside for me: it’s a reminder of how boring and useless grass really is. The blurb about GIMME GREEN (in my last blog) had this information: Lawns carpet 50,000 square miles in the United States, requiring more than 30,000 tons of pesticides each year and 200 gallons of water a day per American.

Grass isn’t a food crop, it’s not even a beauty crop, it’s merely a carpet crop. Think about that next time you use that daily 200 gallons of precious water for grass in a world where millions are hungry and thirsty.